This is more true of conservatives than liberals, and of engineering, the professions, government and business than liberal-heavy sectors of the economy, but hey, I knew that as an undergraduate.

All the heavy-drinking, heavy partying jocks I went to university with are now: 1) running the country or 2) working as mall cops.

The unexpectly high level of gays and bisexuals in the top echelons of corporations, governments, sports, etc., is due to the drinking and BJs mixing freely, especially among "risk takers", i.e., jocks.

Brains, wimps, nerds and geeks need not apply. Except in IT, of course, where large numbers of pretty boys (and a few geek girls) surround an IT Queen who hires and fires.

Now, here comes the really interesting part: the tendancy to hire "drinking buddies" rather than the smart, hard-working, competent employees you'd expect HR staff and manager-administrators to want is so profound, it explains practically every thing mysterious about human society, politics, etc.

One, conspiracy theories are unnecessary if you know how business as usual works.

Two, the Peter Principle (that people rise to the level of their incompetence) is merely a special case of a more general law.

Three, this law, which you have my permission to call Brantgoose's Law, is that society runs not on competence, intelligence, skill, wit, or wisdom, but on trust, and people basically trust only 1) people like themselves and 2) sociopaths.

Sociopaths are experts in creating trust. They are a sort of genius at it. Thus they rise to the level of their inevitable exposure and destruction rather than mere incompetence, and that level is the top of any human venture in sports, religion, science, politics, etc.

The pointy-haired bosses are all sociopaths, although there is a sufficient over-supply of fugly or stupid sociopaths to fill other levels of hierarchy and social rank and station.

Even the social and political laws that govern the rise of the Drinking Buddy-ocracy (aka the Idiocracy) are merely special cases of a still more general law, namely that bad pennies drive out good.

Called Gresham's Law in economics, this law is a basic paradox, namely the Good is the Enemy of the Best and therefore people will always prefer the sure-fire and familiar second best or even mediocrity to the brilliant erratic ways of genius, sainthood or mere competence even.

The reason that conservatives are more likely to prefer "a guy you'd like to have a beer or twenty with" is that they are born incompetents. They are the dumb people who don't know they are dumb. Liberals and geeks and geniuses tend to be the smart people who know they are dumb or the smart people who know they are smart but who can be spectacularly dumb, and so forth.

Conservatives, unlike liberals, base their friendships, business, etc., on trusting In Group members, while liberals tend to trust to laws, institutions, rules and abstract contracts rather than personality or "character". A liberal may very well judge you on the content of your character but she is less likely to care about who you are or what you are. Liberalism in the economic sense, of course, is all about abstract and formal relationships, usually temporary and expedient rather than based on knowing who your grandfather was, belonging to the same church or race, etc.

These two basic types of personality profiles (we are all mixtures) reflect different ways of thinking.

For example, in linguistics you have grammar-based (or rule-based) versus performance-based.The type of Grammar Nazi who simply can not tolerate a split-infinitive, a dangling participle, a preposition used to end a sentence with, etc., is more like a conservative, while the person who allows a violation of the rules because it is Shakespearean in its brilliance is more like a liberal.

These great dichotomies and similar structures repeat themselves in human affairs like the great Platonic solids and patterns such as the fractal repeat in Nature.

And that is why mediocrity is the key to success. Number one, the conservatives in power want more of their own, so your incompetence and other flaws will endear you to them, whether you are an alcoholic or simply dyslexic. Conservatives are moralizing bastards but they are not necessarily moral, or ethical, or safe to trust with your sons and daughters. Liberals can be just as bad but they are always bad in a different way, so they too tend to pursue more of the same.

As a result, you will find very few heavy drinkers in the bureaucracy below the level of senior managers or parachuting partisans and politicians.

You will find professors happily drinking bad wine and eating rubbery cheese, while the party of frat boy preppies next door are stoned out of their minds on any number of expensive drugs and mixed drinks.

If you have the knack of spotting these fundamental universal rules, you will realize that the Universe is a piece of jerry-built crap that barely works and that God either does not exist or he is a demented sociopath Himself.

If not, you will need conspiracy theories to explain why things go wrong.

Which is absurd. The only conspiracy the Universe needs is stupidity. Stupidity, raised to a sufficient level, becomes Evil. There is no Devil--humans are quite capable of doing his job without any assistance.

As for God, a few simple rules suffice to create all the chaos and order a Universe needs or can simply survive, so if there ever was a God, Richard Adams is probably right and he refuses to exist because that would be a dead giveaway and make nonsense of free will.

I know I've missed out on possible promotions at past employers b/c I don't drink. At one place the guy in charge of infrastructure and IT was worthless and played games half of the day but the boss loved him b/c they went out like frat boys 4 nights a week.

serial_crusher:My usual question for interviewees is what kind of beer they drink. The one guy I didn't interview, answered the question on his first day with "miller high life, from a glass, with ice". He didn't really work out for plenty of other reasons, eventually got fired for incompetence, so now that question is kind of crucial.